Shadowy Bombing Case Is Focusing On Reclusive and Enigmatic Figure

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He's a phantom, a reclusive loner with a mop of dark hair and hypnotic eyes who for the most part has gone though life without a trace.

It is only in a blizzard of lawsuits and court cases that have been his obsession for the past 20 years that Walter Leroy Moody Jr. seems to come to life.

As investigators intensify their focus on Mr. Moody in connection with the bombs that killed a Federal judge and a civil rights lawyer last December, they are left with a dominating question. They must decide whether Mr. Moody has spent his life doggedly pursuing the legal rights available to any citizen or whether his incessant involvement with the courts is part of an obsessive pattern behind the mail bombs.

Mr. Moody has not been indicted in connection with the case and has denied any involvement.

Mr. Moody, who was indicted last week on 13 charges stemming from his appeals of a 1972 conviction in the explosion of a pipe bomb that is unrelated to the recent mail bombs, has made much of his life a legal marathon. Most of it came before the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, where Judge Robert S. Vance was killed by a bomb sent to his home outside Birmingham, Ala.

A second bomb was defused at the court's offices here. A third killed Robert Robinson, a civil rights lawyer in Savannah, Ga., and a fourth was defused after being sent to the office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Jacksonville, Fla. #20 Years of Suits and Appeals Mr. Moody has spent almost 20 of his 56 years coming up with new grounds to appeal his 1972 conviction, for possessing a bomb that exploded in his first wife's hands, wounding her severely. The current charges of obstruction of justice, bribery and tampering with witnesses stem from what prosecutors allege was a scheme to fabricate an alibi in that case.

When an attempted murder charge against him in 1983 ended in a hung jury, he sued the three men he was accused of trying to kill, two sheriff's officials and a prosecutor, charging they maliciously prosecuted him.

And since becoming a suspect in the bomb case, he has filed a barrage of motions and legal actions, including challenges to search warrants and a criminal mischief complaint he filed against F.B.I. agents investigating him.

The shadowy picture of Mr. Moody mirrors a case with outlines and motives remaining so murky that despite what seemed to be a racial motivation behind the bombings, investigators are not sure now whether race played any part in them.

''This is not a situation where they know who did it, and it's just a matter of finding them,'' said Bruce Harvey, a recent lawyer for Mr. Moody, who withdrew from the case on Wednesday, citing an inability to reach a satisfactory financial arrangement with him. ''It's a real whodunit at this point.'' But Mr. Moody has become the clear focus of the investigation. His picture has been circulated to hardware dealers who could have sold materials used in making a bomb, and he has been put in a lineup.

When a judge in Macon, Ga., ordered Mr. Moody held without bail last Friday on the perjury and obstruction charges on July 13, he released Mr. Moody's current wife, Susan McBride Moody, 28 years old, on $250,000 bail with orders that she not be in touch her husband. Investigators in the recent bombings said they hoped that by confining Mr. Moody, other witnesses, including Mrs. Moody, would be more cooperative.

Born on March 24, 1934, Mr. Moody grew up in the small central Georgia town of Fort Valley. His father, Walter Leroy Moody Sr., like his own father before him, was an autombile mechanic and is still remembered as a skillful and honest businessman.

The oldest of three children, Mr. Moody seems to have inherited his father's mechanical ability. He spent much of his youth building model airplanes and much of his adult life tinkering with engines and machinery.

But in a small town where everyone knew everyone, Mr. Moody went his own way.

'Roy Was Always a Loner'

''Roy was always a loner,'' said his brother, Bobby Moody, a 43-year-old who raises cattle in Greenwood, S.C. ''I wouldn't have any idea who to tell you who might know him well.''

Mr. Moody graduated from high school in 1953 and enlisted in the Army, serving as a message traffic analyst, a specialist trained to analyze an enemy's transmission by radio, teletype or Morse code. He entered the Army reserves in 1956, and after three years in the reserves, he joined the Air Force for two years.

Mr. Moody had considered going into medicine, but when he resumed his education after the service, he was in and out of school and in and out of relationships. Dr. Thomas M. Hall, a psychiatrist who treated him in 1967, supplied a deposition in connection with the 1972 bombing case that characterized him as harboring violent thoughts, and the doctor testified that he was ''constantly afraid'' Mr. Moody could get into a situation that would end up in ''some sort of destruction toward society.''

Little of Note, Then a Bomb

Still, there was little extraordinary about Mr. Moody's life before May 7, 1972.

That is when his first wife, Hazel, opened a package she found in their kitchen. It turned out to be a homemade bomb that exploded in her face, tearing up her hand, thigh and shoulder, sending scrap metal into her eye, and eventually requiring six operations.

Mr. Moody was arrested, and the authorities charged him with making the bomb and intending to send it with an extortion note to an Atlanta auto dealer who had repossessed his car. On Oct. 19, 1972, he was acquitted of building the bomb but convicted of possessing it. He was sentenced to five years in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. After the conviction on the bomb charge, he and his wife were divorced.

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Paroled after serving three years, he resumed attending school, including classes toward a law degree, and he remarried and found a new line of work. In the late 1970's, he founded The Associated Writers Guild of America, incorporated as a nonprofit business, to help train aspiring writers. In advertisements placed around the country, it offered to print writers' works for a fee in a book called ''Authors to Watch.''

The Better Business Bureau of Metropolitan Atlanta said its file on Mr. Moody's company had been among the most active in its history, with inquiries from 48 states and numerous complaints from people who said they paid money to his company but got nothing in return. At one point, officials say, his business was generating as many as 150 inquiries a day.

In 1983, postal inspectors recommended prosecuting Mr. Moody for mail fraud, but the United States Attorney never did so. In June, postal officials took action to close the business, but Mr. Moody is appealing their order.

An Incident in the Keys

In another business venture, Mr. Moody began Superior Sail Drives Inc., a company that claimed to be developing a revolutionary rotary boat engine and propeller.

On a frigid, windy day in December 1982, he set out with three employees in a 25-foot sloop to take underwater photographs of the propeller.

According to statements all three men made to the police, Mr. Moody abandoned them two miles off Grassy Key, Fla. They told the police he refused to pick them up or throw them life preservers, pried their fingers off a ladder to the boat when they tried to climb back in and threw an anchor at one, hitting him in the head. Only when another boat came into the area were they rescued.

The men later learned that Mr. Moody had taken out $750,000 in life insurance on each man, payable to the company, in which Mr. Moody was the only shareholder.

Mr. Moody said in statements to the police and in court that the throttle of the boat had jammed and he lost control of it. He said he sent out distress calls and was responsible for attracting the attention of the other boat.

Mr. Moody was charged with three counts of attempted murder. The trial ended in a hung jury, and prosecutors decided not to retry the case.

On Dec. 16, 1986, one day before the four-year statute of limitations expired, Mr. Moody filed a Federal lawsuit against the three former employees, the sheriff's deputy who arrested him, the county sheriff and the prosecutor in the case, alleging malicious prosecution. He asked for $1,550,000 in actual damages and the same amount in punitive damages. The case was appealed to the 11th Circuit and was heard by a panel that included Judge Vance, who made comments that indicated skepticism about Mr. Moody's case, a lawyer in the suit said. The case is pending.

Still, investigators say that if Mr. Moody fits most elements of their profile of the mail bomb assailant, one thing about him does not fit the case at all.

Mr. Moody has no history of racial animus, and both his brother and Michael Bergin, a former Moody lawyer who married a black woman, said they believed that if race was behind the mail bombs, they would be surprised if Mr. Moody was involved.

The attack on Mr. Robinson, a bomb that failed to explode at the Jacksonville office of the N.A.A.C.P. and racially abusive letters taking credit for the attacks seemed to indicate a racial element to the bombs.

A Theory of a Diversion

So investigators are pondering this theory: if Mr. Moody is behind the bombs, he may have wanted to attack the court and used the racial attacks and letters only as a diversion to turn attention elsewhere.

With Mr. Moody in jail in connection with last week's indictment, the painstaking and often frustrating investigation is continuing. The arrest, however, may have temporarily derailed Mr. Moody's most recent business venture.

After asking a judge to seal all records of the case to protect his privacy, Mr. Moody was planning to sell T-shirts and a movie script based on his notoriety as the mail bomb suspect. ''They shouldn't be able to get away with that!'' says a brochure he put together for his new enterprise, which also offers free memberships in his writers' guild.

''It may be time for you to let your voice be heard,'' the brochure continues. ''Order several shirts today!''

A version of this article appears in print on July 20, 1990, on Page A00008 of the National edition with the headline: Shadowy Bombing Case Is Focusing On Reclusive and Enigmatic Figure. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe